posted 04-25-2012 01:26 AM                    

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The Hobbit ... Didn't Look So Good
Warners screens 10 minutes at their CinemaCon panel.
April 24, 2012
by Jim Vejvoda

Warner Bros. screened roughly 10 minutes of footage from The Hobbit today at their CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas. The footage was projected in 3D at 48 frames per second for theater owners and press attending the conference.

A taped intro from director Peter Jackson preceded the footage. There is no honest discussion that can be had about this Hobbit footage without emphasizing the 48fps presentation. The film was shot this way and will be digitally projected this way, as well as presented in 3D. So what does 48fps movie footage look like as opposed to your usual 24fps theatrical movie experience? In this reporter's opinion, it looks like live television or hi-def video. And it didn't look particularly good. Yes, this is shocking, but I was actually let down by the Hobbit footage, as were a number of the other journalists that I spoke with afterward.

It looked like an old Doctor Who episode, or a videotaped BBC TV production. It was as shocking as when The Twilight Zone made the boneheaded decision to switch from film to tape one season, and where perfectly good stories were ruined by that aesthetic. Here, there were incredibly sharp, realistic images where colors seem more vivid and brighter than on film, but the darker scenes were especially murky (and the 3D only dims that image even more). Frankly, it was jarring to see Gandalf, Bilbo or the dwarves in action against CG-created characters or even to move quickly down a rocky passage. The whipping of a camera pan or the blur of movement was unsettling.

While 48fps may create a more realistic, "you are there" picture quality, it actually works against The Hobbit from the 10 minutes of footage we saw. This undeniable "reality" kept pulling me out of the movie rather than immersing me fully into its world as the Lord of the Rings films did; the very fantasy element, the artifice of it all (whether it's the wigs, fake beards or CG monsters) was plainly, at times painfully, evident. There was none of the painterly gentleness that film offers a fantasy film, as was so beautifully the case with the original (shot on film) LOTR trilogy. I fully expect the 48fps issue to become the much-talked about "mumbling Bane" flap to come out of CinemaCon.

The best sequence shown was one between Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and Gollum (once again played by Andy Serkis). The latter is his old, split personality self as he debates between killing Bilbo or helping him out. Bilbo finally agrees to play a game of riddles with Gollum. If he wins, Gollum will show Bilbo the way to Bilbo's destination. If Gollum wins? Well, it makes you wonder if Hobbit tastes like chicken. One reason why the 48fps wasn't as distracting here was that it was an extended sequence, the longest by far of the clips shown from An Unexpected Journey today. The CG-ness of Gollum was more evident in this digital format than it was on film back in the LOTR trilogy, but you'd be hard-pressed not to feel goosebumps seeing Serkis back in deceitful action as Gollum.

Also back in action in the footage screened today? Orlando Bloom's archer Legolas and Elijah Wood's Frodo Baggins, although we only got a few glimpses of those two characters. There were also scenes shown between Gandalf the Grey and Radagast the Brown, as well as an action-oriented one seeing Bilbo imperiled by three giant troll-like monsters before Thorin Oakenshield and the dwarves come to his rescue. There were some moments of Ian Holm as the elder Bilbo, life in the Shire, and the heroes' journeys across the snow-capped mountaintops of New Zealand, er, Middle-earth. Jackson stressed in his intro that the footage was unfinished, and this was evident in many of the green screen backdrop scenes we saw, such as the Rivendell one between Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.

I didn't go into CinemaCon expecting to write anything less than great things about The Hobbit, but the very aesthetic chosen by Peter Jackson has made me very nervous about this film. It just looked ... cheap, like a videotaped or live TV version of Lord of the Rings and not the epic return to Tolkien that we have all so long been waiting for. I still have hope for The Hobbit, but I'd be lying if I didn't say my expectations for the film have now been greatly diminished.

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Last year at CinemaCon, James Cameron began his push for the next evolution of cinema — higher framerates. Peter Jackson was the first filmmaker to hear the call to action and shoot a feature film using 48fps. That film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, will be released in the holiday season at the end of this yea. It could very well determine the future of how movies look and how films are shot, projected and viewed both theatrically and at home.

A brief primer: Modern films are shot and projected at 24 frames per second. That has been the industry standard for feature films since the mid-1920s after sound motion pictures were introduced. The low frame rate results in a strobing effect when there is moderate camera movement. You have probably accepted this technological artifacting, but it looks artificial and your brain interprets it as such. Raising the framerate makes movement look a lot smoother, and gives the impression of an enhanced resolution. The low framerate is also one of the major factors of why some people experience discomfort while watching 3D movies.

Lets go back in time to last year’s convention. Cameron gave a presentation to a auditorium full of skeptical theater owners/managers (and a few press). And by the end of the presentation, which compared footage shot at 24fps up against the same sequences shot at 48fps and 60fps, most walked away believing they had seen the future of cinema. I was a believer. I wrote:

The footage shot at 48 frames a second looked incredible. The best way to describe it, is to quote Cameron: “If watching a 3D movie is like looking through a window, then [with this] we’ve taken the glass out of the window and we’re staring at reality.”

Cut to one year later: Warner Bros held a presentation which previewed their entire 2012 line-up (you can see my reaction to all the footage in a separate posting). That presentation included over ten minutes of footage from Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit. Buzz was at an all time high to see this footage, which says something when you’re sharing a panel with Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises. Many people I had talked with were expecting to be blown away by the footage, and especially the new, higher, frame rates. Most of us were not.

Please note: I won’t go into the content of the Hobbit footage in this post, as this is not the point of this article. If you want to read scene descriptions, go elsewhere. If you want to hear some of our reactions to some of the footage, watch our video blog elsewhere on the site. This article is about frame rates and the future of cinema technology.

Jackson recorded a video introducing the footage, being very clear that it was unfinished, featured green screens, and early effects. He said that he chose ten minutes of footage because audiences need time to get use to the new frame rate, time to adjust and see it for what it is. He praised the step to 48 frames per second by saying it gave a new clarity to the footage he shot, comparing it to shooting on 65mm film.

The footage opened up with wide expansive shots of people walking on mountains and over rich green landscapes — those awesome shots that became synonymous with the Lord of the Rings series when it began a decade ago. Thee shots looked incredible — almost like something you would see in an IMAX 3D nature documentary — so extremely vivid and breathtaking, and more real than we’ve ever seen these shots before.

This is the future of Cinema… I thought…

But my amazement quickly came to an end as the sizzle reel transitioned from the landscape footage to the character centric. Everything looked so… different. It was jarring.

The change from 24 frames per second to 48 frames per second is HUGE. It completely changes what every image looks like, the movements, the tone, everything is different.

It looked like a made for television BBC movie.

It looked like when you turn your LCD television to the 120 hertz up-conversion setting.

It looked uncompromisingly real — so much so that it looked fake.

More noticeable in the footage was the make-up, the sets, the costumes. Hobbiton and Middle Earth didn’t feel like a different universe, it felt like a special effect, a film set with actors in costumes. It looked like behind the scenes footage.

The movement of the actors looked… strange. Almost as if the performances had been partly sped up. But the dialogue matched the movement of the lips, so it wasn’t an effect of speed-ramping.

It didn’t look cinematic. Not at all, even with a top filmmaker like Peter Jackson at the helm.

“This is the future of cinema,” I wondered?

But it wasn’t just me — almost everyone I talked to, almost every conversation I overheard while leaving the presentation, all centered around how it didn’t look good.

I think it might be too early to completely write off this jump to higher frame rates. I’m trying my best to be as non-sensationalistic as I possibly can.

Could it be that the footage is so unfinished that it just didn’t look right? Miracles can be accomplished in color time and post processing, so who knows?

Could it be that we’ve grown up looking at 24 frames per second and that this newer, presumably better, higher frame rate looks bad only because its something we’re not use to? Possibly? I don’t know. Maybe in 30 years we’ll be looking back at the choppiness of 24fps films and wonder how we could watch something so unrealistic. I really believed this would be possible leaving Cameron’s presentation last year, but this year I’m a lot more doubtful.

I’m a very enthusiastic person, wanting to embrace change. I’m an early adopter of new technology, I welcome improvements whenever I can. 48 frames per second made sense to me, but after seeing real movie footage shot and projected, I couldn’t be more unsure about it.

Vendors claim that a large amount of the digital projectors already in theaters will be easily upgradable to 48fps through a software update (of course, those tech vendors will probably charge for the patch). Warner Bros and Peter Jackson are hoping that most theaters will upgrade before the film comes out in December. Judging from the reaction from theater owners and managers, I’m not sure if that will happen or not. If it does, I do for see that the change to a higher frame rate could be more polarizing than the jump to 3D. If it looks anything like what was presented today at CinemaCon, I think a lot of people will be angry about this change (when they finally see it for themselves).

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Based on the deflated reaction to 10 minutes of footage shown today from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson’s state-of-the-art high-definition epic may or may not forever change the way we view movies, but it will definitely revolutionize the way we talk about that strange, hard-to-describe fluorescent look HD video can sometimes have.

There are two ways to look at the clips featured at the annual gathering of theater owners: As storytelling, the first half of Jackson’s two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is perfectly in sync with the tone and quality of his groundbreaking The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But as a platform for new cinematic technology, the clips received an underwhelming reaction at best. Read on for more details after the jump.

Tech: Get the latest news, photos, and more

The clip began with a filmed intro from a jolly Jackson on the set of The Hobbit in New Zealand, in which he delivered a quick lesson on the history of frame rates that was surprisingly fascinating.

To put it simply: Right now, every second of footage you see in a movie is made up of 24 pictures. In the silent era, it was roughly 16 to 18 pictures (or frames) per second. With The Hobbit, Jackson is leaping to 48 frames per second, resulting in an ultra-crisp image.

Sound promising? That’s what everyone in the 4,100-seat theater was thinking.

Jackson was hoping to inspire the theater owners to upgrade their projection equipment as necessary to showcase the film at the accelerated rate, which he said should be an easy conversion with most digital projectors. “I’m really hoping with the support of the exhibitors, we can start the process of changing the entire industry to higher frame rates, which quite honestly provide a much more attractive experience, especially in 3-D.”

Jackson said the format was “much more gentle on the eyes, without the strobing or as much flicker, and much less eye strain.” However, he may be underestimating how much those so-called flaws have become part of the language of visual storytelling.

Shooting at 48 frames, he added, “gives you much more the illusion of real life.”

That may be the problem.

The clips Jackson went on to show looked much more like visiting the set of a film than seeing the textured cinematography of a finished movie. While most films aim for a soft, natural glow, this had a more stark and fluorescent lighting style.

Hopes were high, but reaction in the audience was mixed at best:

“Great Scott, THE HOBBIT in 48 frames-per-second is a thing to behold. Totally different experience. Not all will like the change,” tweeted Variety film editor Josh Dickey.

“Here’s what The Hobbit looked like to me: a hi-def version of the 1970s I, Claudius. It is drenched in a TV-like — specifically ’70s-era BBC — video look. People on Twitter have asked if it has that soap opera look you get from badly calibrated TVs at Best Buy, and the answer is an emphatic YES,” wrote Devin Faraci of BadAssDigest.com, in a thorough drubbing of the format.

“Saw ten minutes of Hobbit in 48fps 3D. Very exciting, but I’m now very unsure about higher framerates. 48fps feature films will likely divide moviegoers — I expect to see stronger hate, more so than 3D,” tweeted Slashfilm.com’s Peter Sciretta.

“Saw the 10 minutes of raw The Hobbit footage in 48FPS 3D. Intriguing, the footage looks amazing, but the 48FPS experience is an odd change,” tweeted Alex Billington of FirstShowing.com

“Saw 10 min of THE HOBBIT in 48fps. It’s def a drastic change from 24fps and many are not going to be on board with it,” tweeted Steven Weintraub of Collider.com

Jackson said he chose to show 10 minutes of footage “because it actually takes your eyes a little bit of time to get used to 48 frames.” And the preview came with the caveat that many scenes were lacking visual effects. “It’s not really showing you a sense of what those shots will look like in the finished film, but it’s allowing you to judge the projection quality,” Jackson said.

Whether that mitigates the negative fallout or not, perhaps Jackson and Warner Bros. should have waited until the scenes were fully completed before presenting the new technology.

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For years, James Cameron has been telling everyone who would listen (mostly his army of high-priced whores) that a lot of the early problems people had with 3D – that it required slower cuts and camera movements because of strobing and blurring – could be solved with higher frame rates, which is relatively easy to accomplish (your TV is already capable of doing much higher than film’s 24 frames per second, for instance). Peter Jackson explained last year:

Looking at 24 frames every second may seem ok–and we’ve all seen thousands of films like this over the last 90 years–but there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly, the image can judder or “strobe.”

Shooting and projecting at 48 fps does a lot to get rid of these issues. It looks much more lifelike, and it is much easier to watch, especially in 3-D.

Jackson put his money where his beardy mouth is, shooting The Hobbit at 48 fps, and today Warner Bros debuted some of the footage at CinemaCon.

Peter Jackson said in a videotaped message that he hopes his movie can be played in 48fps in “as many cinemas as possible” when it opens on Dec. 14.
In his message, Jackson stated that higher frame rates could make cinema “more attractive,” especially in 3D as it is “more gentle on the eyes.” He added that 2D at 48fps also looks “fantastic.”
The clarity Jackson described was visible in the presentation, but since the clips were described as “a work in progress” Warner did not screen footage that was fully color-corrected, or featuring completed VFX work.

And if I could sum up the collective reaction, I’d say it’s something along the lines of “OH MY GOD A WITCH, BURN IT!”

Saw the 10 minutes of raw The Hobbit footage in 48FPS 3D. Intriguing, the footage looks amazing, but the 48FPS experience is an odd change. – Alex Billington, Firstshowing

Oh no. Not a fan of 48fps. Oh no no no. [...] Listening to Cinemacon people – theater owners – this 48fps demo sold NOBODY. [...] THE HOBBIT, frankly, did not look cinematic. -Devin Faraci, BadassDigest

Saw ten minutes of Hobbit in 48fps 3D. Very exciting, but I’m now very unsure about higher framerates #CinemaCon -Peter Sciretta, SlashFilm

Saw 10 min of THE HOBBIT in 48fps. It’s def a drastic change from 24fps and many are not going to be on board with it. #thehobbit -Steve Weintraub, Collider

I had a feeling this 48fps stuff was gonna just look like amped up 120Hz on an HDTV, which looks awful. Seems to potentially be the case. -Kris Tapley, InContention

The fact is that 48 fps 3D is the most startlingly “real” 3D I’ve ever seen in my life. The downside for older types is that it’s too real. [...] In a word, 48 fps 3D looks like high-def video. It doesn’t look “cinematic”, lacking that filtered or gauzy look we’re all accustomed to. -Jeff Wells, HollywoodElsewhere

All of you clever critics there and not one person had there wherewithal to say, “Frame Rates? More like FRAME RAPES!” Talk about a missed opportunity.

Anyway, that seemed to be the general consensus from Twitter. Have you ever tried to watch an old movie on Blu-Ray and it looks all weird like a soap opera? I get the feeling it’s like that. Something to get used to. Meanwhile, Rebecca Murray of About.com writes:

It’s literally like being on the set next to the actors as they’re performing. [...] Once audiences get to see The Hobbit screened at the 48 frames per second rate when it’s released in theaters on December 14, 2012, I can guarantee moviegoers are going to demand all films be presented at 48 fps.

So there you have it, 48fps is either doomed to fail or the new standard all films must follow. Isn’t the echo chamber fun?

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posted 04-25-2012 08:12 AM                    

quote: Kris Verhanneman

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The upgrade for this is not only for High Frame Rate. You do get other advantages.

4K projection
better 3D
HDMI inputs for your live events (dolby internal media block)

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posted 04-25-2012 10:01 AM                       

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Could it be that the footage is so unfinished that it just didn’t look right? Miracles can be accomplished in color time and post processing

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posted 04-25-2012 11:14 AM                    

quote: Brad Miller

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4k projection is POSSIBLE, but the upgrade does not provide it. You are still talking a major outlay of even more money on a projector upgrade.

Better 3D? Not for me, but I can see where others may think so.

HDMI inputs are already a reality with a scaler.

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posted 04-25-2012 11:18 AM                    

quote: Jonathan Althaus

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What about screens that are already capable of 4k, HFR, and HDMI? No further money needed

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